Tag: Donald Trump

One thing you have to understand about Mr. Zucker. What he does, he does for show. For ratings. If he could get away with claiming Trump met with Putin on the dark side of the moon to concoct a way to beat Hillary Clinton, he would run with it. If he could get away with claiming Arnold Schwarzenegger was the love child of Joseph Stalin and Greta Garbo, he would lead the evening newscast with it. He keeps selling the CNN Trump-Russia “investigation” because he’s (barely) getting away with it and he thinks it’ll keep drawing an audience.

In April, CNN boss Jeff Zucker told the New York Times, “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.” The “it” was certainly the 2016 presidential campaign.

Zucker always has understood politics in this corrupt way—and in the process, he helped elect a US president and a California governor.

Who is Trump’s most consistent media enemy now? CNN is right up there.

But Jeff Zucker, CNN’s boss, was the man who launched The Apprentice, starring Donald Trump, at NBC, in 2004.

In other words, Zucker happened to play a major role in electing Donald Trump. There is no getting around it.

Washington Post, October 2, 2016: “Looking for someone specific to hold responsible for the improbable rise of Donald Trump?”

“Although there are many options, you could do worse than to take a hard look at Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide.”

“It was Zucker, after all, who as the new head of NBC Entertainment gave Trump his start in reality TV with ‘The Apprentice’ and then milked the real estate developer’s uncanny knack for success for all it was worth in ratings and profits.”

“And it succeeded wildly — boosting the network’s ratings, as well as Zucker’s [and Trump’s] meteoric career. In turn, under Zucker, the show gave rise to ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ another Trump extravaganza. And, in turn, Zucker became the head of NBC overall.”

“The show [The Apprentice] was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” according to the book ‘Trump Revealed,’ by Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish.”

“But make no mistake: There would be no Trump-the-politician without Trump-the-TV-star. One begot the other.”

POLITICS IS TELEVISION, AND TELEVISION IS POLITICS.

If you’re looking for a person who embodies that fake version of reality most purely, you need look no further than Jeff Zucker.

Despite his network’s present hatred of Trump, Zucker would give Trump his own show right now if he wanted one.

For ratings and ad revenues.

Let’s go back in time and consider another event, one which I’ve analyzed in great detail. It took place on NBC in 2004, when Zucker was the head of the network’s entertainment division. Keep in mind that The Tonight Show, with Jeno Leno, was a prime piece of the entertainment division then. What Leno pulled off in 2004 had to have the OK from Zucker, because it was a highly unusual move, a distinctly unethical move.

What happened when an actor wanted to launch a political career and become a governor? The whole news division of a major network surrendered itself, for one ratings-busting night, to a talk show.

This is how Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California governor’s race. It all came down to his famous appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he announced that he was going to run.

I obtained a copy of show, watched it many times, transcribed the dialogue, and noted the audience reactions.

Breaking down the segments revealed what happens when news and entertainment and PR and political advocacy all blur together in a single wave.

The show had been hyped as the moment when Arnold would announce whether he was going to run in the recall election against California Governor Gray Davis.

The public anticipation was sky-high. No one seemed concerned that NBC was turning over its news division, for one night, to its entertainment division. Jeff Zucker, head of NBC entertainment, was all in.

Turning over network news to network entertainment was precisely the subject of the best movie ever made about television, Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. That didn’t register with the national media.

If Arnold decided to run for governor, he wouldn’t be announcing it at a stale press conference at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, after a brief introduction from The Snoozer, LA Mayor Richard Riordan. No, Arnold would obtain a rocket boost from Jay Leno.

Keep in mind that talk shows warm up and prep their studio audiences to act and respond with amphetamine-like enthusiasm.

And then that audience transmits its glow and howling racket to the wider television audience, thereby blowing an artificially enhanced event across the landscape.

On the night of August 6, 2003, Tonight Show host Jay Leno devoted two six-minute segments to The Arnold.

Of course, it was more than an interview. Jay had been touting this night as the occasion for a key revelation in the comic play called The California Recall Election.

Arnold would say yes or Arnold would say no. He would run for governor or he would decline.

Bigger than conventional news, Arnold strode out on to Jay’s stage. A Tonight Show camera picked him up from a grossly complimentary low angle, making him appear even larger and more physically imposing than he is. Jay was positioned standing behind him, applauding, lending an affirmative gloss to the entrance. Already, it looked and felt political.

This was not a beginning; the impression was of something already in motion, a train to catch up with.

As the man of the hour sat down next to Jay, he commented that there was a big audience in the house (“Can you believe all these people here?”) and, capping his first gambit, he stated that every one of them was running for governor of California. Ha-ha. (At one point, there were 135 gubernatorial candidates.)

Quickly, Jay gets down to business. The business of making the evening extra-special: “Now, I don’t think we’ve ever had this much press at The Tonight Show for any—[let’s look at] our press room—normally [the press] sit in the audience.”

Cut to a stark room, shot from above. About 40 reporters doing almost nothing at tables. Obviously, the room was set up for this event.

Jay cracks a couple of jokes about the press gaggle, lowers his voice and turns his full attention to Arnold: “…it’s been weeks…and people going back and forth…taken you awhile, and you said you would come here tonight and tell us your decision. So what is your decision?”

Arnold replies, “Well, Jay, after thinking for a long time, my decision is…”

The sound cuts off, and the TV screen displays an old PLEASE STAND BY notice. Thick white letters against a background of an ancient station test pattern from the 1950s. A mechanical tone plays for several seconds.

Jay, going along—as if Arnold had spilled the beans during a momentary technical malfunction—shouts, “Right, good, right! I tell you I am shocked! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”

Jay then starts out from the bottom again. “[Whether you’re going to run has been] in my monologue…it’s been good for, like, a thousand jokes over the last couple of weeks…”

Once more, he gently poses the question. “What are you going to do?” It’s still too early for an answer, and Jay knows it.

Arnold wants another false start. He’s planned it.

“Well, my decision obviously is a very difficult decision to make, you know…it was the [most] difficult decision that I’ve made in my entire life, except the one in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax.”

Laughter, applause, whistles.

The studio audience warms to the fact that Arnold glimpses an absurdity about the whole proceeding.

“He’s our Arnie, laughing the way we laugh. Hell, all we’ve got are laughs in this life, and our boy isn’t going to go stuffed-shirt on us.”

Arnold then gives his rehearsed political speech.

He reflects that California was a grand land of opportunity when he arrived in 1968. It was the greatest state in the greatest nation.

However, now the atmosphere in California is “disastrous,” he says. There is a “disconnect” (thank you, pop psych 101) between the people and the politicians.

“The politicians are fiddling, fumbling, and failing.”

Very big applause follows. The audience is doing its job.

Close by, off camera, we hear Jay thumping his own personal hand claps. The host is pumping his studio crowd and giving his seal of approval to a remark whose veracity is supposed to be tested by the recall election itself.

And there is a phalanx of teen-age girls screaming at a very high pitch in the studio. They’re adding a major element of hysterical enthusiasm. Where did they come from? Are they a legitimate Arnold demographic? Were they pulled out of a Valley mall to paper the crowd? Do they migrate from talk show to talk show? From this point forward, they’ll play a huge role in every audience outburst.

Arnold gathers steam. He tells one and all that the people of California are doing their job.

They’re working hard.

Paying their taxes.

Raising their families.

But the politicians are not doing their job.

Now he executes a blend around the far turn: “And the man that is failing the people more than anyone is [Governor] Gray Davis!”

The crowd goes wild. The girls scream as if they’re at a kiddie rock concert in the magic presence of four sixteen-year-old pretty boys. It’s eerie.

And now the audience is suddenly on edge.

They can handle the juice. The longed-for result.

Arnold senses it.

He lets the audience-hysteria roller coaster die down and then, taking it up to heaven, announces that, he, Arnold is…

Yes…

GOING TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA.

Boom. Bang. Pow. Zow.

The studio audience cracks the ceiling. Wilder than wild. The girls are shrieking walls of sound way above high C. Undoubtedly, the show is flashing applause signs.

Jay shakes his head and grins like a pro hypster who’s just witnessed a very, very good variation on bait and switch. As if Arnold was supposed to say no, but now he’s saying yes.

The Tonight Show band lays down some heavy chords.

Jay shouts, “There you go! There you go! That woke ‘em up! That woke ‘em up!” We cut to the press room, and sure enough, the reporters are now on phones, typing at their keyboards. The story is live and good to go. A global event is underway.

Amid the roar and the music, Jay, smiling broadly and wisely, shakes his finger at Arnold and says to him, “You know something?”

It seems Jay’s about to utter, “That’s the best damn switcheroo I ever saw!” But he doesn’t do it. Instead, as the noise abates, he says it’s a good time to go to a break.

The band plows into a funk riff, under the applause, and the show cuts to commercial.

The sea has parted. The consecration has been performed.

The ax felled the tree in the forest, and everyone heard it.

Marshall McLuhan rolled over in his grave, sat up, grinned, lit a cigar, and sipped a little brandy.

After the commercials, in the next six-minute segment, Jay and Arnold attain a few more highs of audience madness.

High one: Arnold mentions that 1.6 million Californians have signed the recall petition and are saying, “We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore!” Wowee.

No one notices or remembers this line was made massively famous in Network, the bitter satire on news as entertainment.

Is it remotely possible Arnold recalls the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film and its newsman, Howard Beale, who survives a ratings dive by delivering a delirious populist message on air, and becomes, for a short time, the most revered man in America?

Is it possible Arnold knows the TV network portrayed in the film gave its news division to its entertainment division—exactly what’s transpiring right there, for the moment, on The Tonight Show?

High two: Arnold clarifies his message to all politicians everywhere. “Do your job for the people and do it well, or otherwise you’re out. Hasta la vista, baby!” Zowee.

High three: After telling the crowd they all know Gray Davis can run a dirty campaign “better than anyone”—and that Davis has been selling off pieces of California to special interests—Arnold says with conviction and confidence, “I do not have to bow to any special interests; I have plenty of money; no one can pay me off; trust me, no one.” Audience hysteria. They love that he’s rich.

High four: Arnold says of Davis, “Everyone knows this man has to go!” Huge roar.

High five: Arnold plays a final pun card. “I will pump up Sacramento!” Yet another roar.

The band takes it out with more funk. Jay stands up and goes over and hugs Arnold, in profile, near his desk, and follows him closely toward an exit at stage left. Jay starts to whisper something in Arnold’s ear, but pulls back and smiles and, still on camera, applauds Arnold along with the audience.

It’s show biz in a bottle. Jay, Arnold, the crowd, the band, bouncing off one another and yielding the effect of absolute (synthetic) thrill.

The Tonight Show provided the moment for a globally famous actor to decide to run for office in the same state where the show originates. In the entertainment capital of the world. In front of the clear prime-cut admiration of the host.

And the studio audience, that specialized creature from whose maw instant credibility can be coaxed and birthed in seconds—was very, very ready to go. All along.

Imagine an advance man pre-selling this kind of PR stunt:

“I know a guy who can introduce your message to the softest, wildest, water-cooler crowd this side of paradise.”

“Oh yeah? How big a crowd?”

“Only a thousand or two. But they’re instantly hooked up to, say, ten million people in the target area. It’s as infectious as Ebola.”

“Come on.”

“And that’s not all. I’ve got a host for that softest, wildest audience, and he has the whole world in the palm of his hand. When he exposes your message—for the first time anywhere—and when his audience goes nuts with glee, nothing will stand in your way. Your opponents will go down like bowling pins.”

“Too good to be true.”

“Wrong. And let me point out what I’m saving you from. If you tried to launch your message at a shopping center or a press club or a hotel ballroom or construction site or on a movie-studio sound stage, you could get laughed right out of town. Really. Because, let’s face it, you do have a pretty vapid message when you boil it down. You need a unique venue, where the joke and the camp and the craziness are all folded into the event itself, and the shock and surprise and hoopla are integrated. You need an audience that celebrates bad and good jokes as all good, and the host has the ability to marry up every shred of this bizarre happening and take his crowd to orgasm.”

“And the contagion factor?”

“The audience in the television studio and the viewing audience at home are One. My boy, what stuns and delights the former incorporates itself into the living cells of the latter. The home audience is terrified of being left out. The host and his in-studio crowd give instant universal legitimacy to the moment. Believe me, it’s irresistible.”

“Like that McLuhan thing. The audience becomes the actor.”

“Precisely.”

That is how it happened. That is how Arnold Schwarzenegger obtained his billion-dollar ad on Jay Leno, on August 6, 2003, and that was when he won the recall election. There was no counter-strategy for it.

Governor Gray Davis was left out in the cold.

The announcement of Arnold’s candidacy was the end of the election.

In the aftermath, media pundits did not punch up this piece of mind control with any serious heat; nor did they immediately seek a heavy investigation of NBC’s ethics in allowing the Leno-Arnold event to take place.

The Tonight Show was a perfect killing ground: Arnold, the earnest and powerful and Germanically jolly and occasionally self-deprecating soul, aware of the comic-book component of his success; Jay, the jokester, who can work as a homer and straight man at the drop of a hat; and Jay’s audience, willingly propelled into the late-night nexus of “we’ll laugh so hard at any old damn thing we’ll make a cosmic celebration out of it.”

Something out of nothing.

GE (then the owner of NBC): “We bring good things to life.”

An election campaign message was passed, hand to hand, mind to mind, adrenal gland to adrenal gland, from a concocted, groomed, cultivated, prepackaged television studio audience to every voter-district in California, and out to the whole world.

When people show up in the studio to see Leno in person, they soon understand the game. They’re not just there as happy onlookers. They’re drawn into the process. They’re offered a trade-off.

If they become active shills for the show right there in the studio, they’ll become part of the story. They’ll attain new status. Their laughs and squeals and shrieks and rebound guffaws, their revved-up salvational applause, at those moments when a guest segment or a joke is falling flat, will provide key segue and filler and affirmation and speed candy for the larger audience at home. It’s a group collaboration.

Who cares—except when a fading movie action hero suddenly says he’s going to take over the reins of California?

In the television studio, and in millions of homes, the audience roared and helped Arnold go for his coronation. They experienced a reasonable facsimile of emotional torque and busted a move that showered sparks around Arnold’s head and pushed him through a porthole into an ozone that just might have been the closest thing they’d ever find to immortality.

On October 10, three days after Arnold scored number one in the recall vote count, The NY Times ran a piece by Bill Carter headlined, “NBC Supports the Politically Partisan Leno.”

But Carter’s story was merely about Jay, on the night of October 7, taking the stage in Los Angeles to introduce Arnold as the recall election winner.

THIS was the issue? This was the barrier that Leno had crossed? Carter mentioned nothing about those 12 minutes on August 6th, on The Tonight Show, when Arnold announced he was running and thereby sewed up the election.

Jeff Zucker, then the head of entertainment at NBC (NOW THE BOSS AT CNN), told Carter he was aware Jay was going to introduce Arnold at the victory celebration. “I did not and do not have a problem with it,” he said.

Zucker noted that Jay was a private citizen with all the accruing rights of same.

Not a word from Zucker either, about the propriety of Leno hosting Arnold’s campaign launch on August 6, on The Tonight Show.

The Studio Audience, on the night of August 6, 2003, fingered and chose and elected a governor of California.

Jay Leno has gone on to thousands of other jokes.

But he’ll never forget that one.

And neither will Zucker.

He helped elect Arnold. And he made Trump a global star of the first magnitude on The Apprentice, and thereby helped him win the presidency.

If you like interesting coincidences, both the Leno Moment and launch of The Apprentice happened in 2004. And when Donald Trump left The Apprentice in 2015, who took over as the host?

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here

Since “fake news” is all the rage within the mainstream media, here’s the top 10 “real” news stories they reported on — and some downright propagandized — that turned out to be, well, fake. It’s the reason this new narrative of “fake news” will never catch on, and why Americans’ trust in the press is at an all-time low.

1. If you like your health care plan, you can keep it

In selling his health care overhaul, on at least 37 separate occasions, President Barack Obama pledged that Americans would be allowed to keep the plans they liked. In 2013, about 4 million Americans got cancellation letters, and PolitiFact labeled the statement the lie of the year.

But that didn’t stop reporters from writing repeated stories beforehand on how great Obamacare would be, even though, the administration knew at the time they were making the statements, some health coverage would be lost.

2. Hands Up, Don’t Shoot

“Hands up, don’t shoot” didn’t happen in Ferguson, Missouri, but that didn’t stop the narrative from spreading throughout the news media and in Black Lives Matter protests. Faulty witness accounts spread the rumor that Michael Brown had his hands raised in surrender, and mouthed the words “don’t shoot” before being shot by cop Darren Wilson.

A grand jury couldn’t confirm the narrative, and neither could the Department of Justice in its own investigation of the shooting. What was confirmed was that Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. The popular “hands up” slogan couldn’t be corroborated by any ballistic evidence, reliable witness statements, or DNA samples.

According to the DOJ report: “Although some witnesses state that Brown held his hands up at shoulder level with his palms facing outward for a brief moment, these same witnesses describe Brown then dropping his hands and ‘charging’ at Wilson.”

It was all a lie.

3. The Iran deal was negotiated with moderate Iranians, not the radical mullahs

This was the narrative in the mainstream media while the deal was being made. It was not until an insightful New York Times Magazine piece did we see how the Obama administration snowballed the press with its lies.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told The Times in May. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change.

“They literally know nothing,” he said.

That’s how Mr. Rhodes was able to shape the narrative that the U.S. was negotiating with moderate Iranians, not the hardliners. In The Times piece, Mr. Rhodes admits the administration wasn’t “betting on” moderates taking charge in Iran, but that he was just selling the deal to a gullible press in order to further his boss’s legacy.

4. Bowe Bergdahl exchange was hard-fought/negotiated

In 2014, the Obama administration allowed five detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be transferred to Qatar in exchange for the release of Army Sgt Bowe Bergdahl, who was being held by the Taliban. The exchange was lauded by the press and at the Rose Garden, where President Obama held a ceremony saying Mr. Bergdahl was “never forgotten.”

“Sergeant Bergdahl has missed birthdays, and holidays and simple moments with family and friends which all of us take for granted. But while Bowe was gone, he was never forgotten” — not by his family or his hometown in Idaho or the military, Mr. Obama said. “And he wasn’t forgotten by his country, because the United States of America does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind.”

It was later revealed Mr. Bergdahl deserted his unit, and that’s why he was captured by the Taliban. He’s been ordered to face a general court martial on two charges, which could impose a lifetime sentence. Mr. Bergdahl has requested a pardon from Mr. Obama.

5. Benghazi attack inspired by online viral video

According to the Benghazi Report released this year by Congress, the Obama administration knew almost immediately after the attack on the American consulate it was one of terrorism, but were unwilling to admit it to the American public. The media was all too willing to swallow the administration’s weak lie the attack — which happened on Sept. 11 — was a spontaneous event spurred by protests of an online video that was offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.

6. Climate change will produce more storms like Hurricane Katrina

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the media and liberals like Al Gore were predicting more storms in our future because of the rapid pace of climate change.

In 2006 CBS’s Hannah Storm predicted Katrina-like storms would happen “all along our Atlantic and Gulf coastlines,” and CBS anchor Russ Mitchell said there was “no end in sight” for big hurricanes a month after Katrina hit landfall.

Guess what? The U.S. hasn’t experienced a storm like Katrina since it hit more than a decade ago.

7. Cuba has great health care; murderous dictator Fidel Castro was good

After the death of Fidel Castro this month, the mainstream media went out of its way to romanticize the leadership of the murderous dictator — saying although the country was communist, he was a great orator who inspired his people and healthcare and literacy improved under his watch.

“How Cubans Live as Long as Americans at a Tenth a Cost,” an Atlantic headline read on Nov. 29, four days after Mr. Castro’s death. “Lessons of physical prosperity in a despotic regime.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote in an opinion piece: “Fidel Castro, human rights violator that he was, did plenty of good for Cuba.”

Oh really? Mr. Castro oppressed his people for 59 years, torturing and killing an estimated 15,000 of his own citizens who opposed him. His reign was so idyllic, over an eighth of the island’s population chose to go into exile, with about 700,000 coming into the U.S. prior to 1980.

8. Myth of the killer cop epidemic

If you were to listen to the Black Lives Matter movement and it’s sympathizers in the media, you would think that white police officers were out targeting and killing black men at an unprecedented tick. Black Lives Matter, and all of its umbrella organizations, has claimed that every 28 hours a black man is killed by a police officer.

The figure comes from an April 2013 report called “Operation Ghetto Storm,” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report “is a window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and practice of a government and society that will spare no cost to control the lives of Black people,” the preface reads.

The Washington Post’s fact-checker gave the claim four Pinocchios, saying the victims studied in the report were not all unarmed, and they were not all killed by the police. The group was including those who rushed and or ambushed police in their report as well as those killed by “police officers, security guards or vigilantes.” As you can imagine, the term vigilantes was loosely defined.

The paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined thousands of incidents at 10 large police departments in California, Florida and Texas, concluded that police were no more likely to shoot non-whites than whites after factoring in extenuating circumstances.

9. Donald Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon is a white supremacist

There is absolutely no evidence of this, but the mainstream media loves to splash the idea around — or at least infer that Mr. Bannon, because of his association with alt-right website Breitbart, is a white supremacist, racist, bigoted, xenophobe, etc.

“White nationalists see advocate in Steve Bannon who will hold Trump to his campaign promises,” a CNN headline read.

“Steve ‘Turn on the Hate’ Bannon in the White House,” The New York Times editorial board wrote.

It’s all in an effort to smear the man who won Mr. Trump the White House, and therefore the president-elect himself.

10. Donald Trump can’t win the White House

Mr. Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said during a Harvard University panel last week that the mainstream media’s narrative saying Mr. Trump could never get the 270 electoral college votes he needed to win the White House was the biggest fake news of them all.

And she was right.

Going into Nov. 8, here’s a sampling of the mainstream media’s headlines — heck, Newsweek thought Hillary Clinton had it such in the bag they printed out copies of their magazine ahead of time with the title: “Madam President.”

NBC: “On eve of election day, Clinton maintains her lead over Trump”

Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton has enough electoral votes to win the White House in final Fix map”

New York Times: “Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance”

CNN: “CNN’s Poll of Polls show Clinton leading Trump by a 4-point margin”

Bud Jackson, Chair of American Working Families, and James Antle, politics editor at the Washington Examiner, join RT’s Ed Schultz to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s Sunday tweet in which he suggested a 35 percent tariff on companies outsourcing American jobs. This came in the wake of Trump’s much-publicized Carrier deal, which kept nearly 1,000 Hoosiers from being laid off. Critics termed it a glorified bribe to Carrier, which received massive federal subsidies in exchange for keeping its Indiana factory open. They also discuss Trump’s recent phone call with Taiwan’s president and its implication for geopolitics in the region.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

“…he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who [also] hosted a [presidential] debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”

So…You can hate Trump, but if you can’t find joy in this story, you’re in need of a blood transfusion.

Way back at the beginning of the presidential campaign, I said that if Trump does nothing but run against the media he’ll be doing the country a great service, because they’re all snakes and cover-up artists and liars and they’ve been hypnotizing the population for as long as they’ve been around. Trump went on to exceed my expectations in that regard.

If you can’t stand Trump, you can fantasize about some other theoretical president who might have carried off his attacks on fake news as well, and with the same effect, but this is the man who did it. And yesterday was a landmark event in history.

Understand that these grifters—because that’s what they are—believe they own the news and the truth, even as they’re making it up by the ton. They and their masters—six companies that control 90% of big media—dispense fake reality to the populace 24/7. And now…

They’re lost inside their own bubble. They’ve never felt this kind of fury from a president. They don’t know what to do.

Of course they’re outraged, and of course they’ll continue doing whatever they can to undermine Trump, but they know he couldn’t care less that they’re deeply, deeply offended. Their little trick—“how dare you insult us”—won’t work. In fact, it’ll make things worse for them. Not long ago, one survey placed the public’s trust in media at 6%, which is about on the same level as the trust in public bathrooms in scuzzy bars by the railroad tracks next to mining camps in the 19th century.

These media honkers can stand in front of their mirrors and keep combing their hair and they can bring in new make-up people, and adjust the studio lighting and build new desks, and they can laugh and smile at cocktail parties and pretend they’re still in the ascendance, but they’re rapidly turning into laughingstocks, and the derision keeps building. If you feel sorry for them, your sympathy is grossly misplaced.

The final straw here is Steve Bannon, Trump’s new chief strategist and special counselor. The editor of Breitbart, Bannon recently stated in an interview: “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If…

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

They kept telling the American people Hillary Clinton was going to win the election; and in every way they could think of, they told the American people this was a good idea.

Then, on election night, they, the media, crashed.

The results came in.

The media went into deep shock.

As protests and riots then spread across America, the media neglected to mention a) they’d been bashing Trump because he said he might not accept the outcome of the vote, and b) here were large numbers of people on the Democrat side who weren’t accepting the outcome of the vote.

A new campaign had to be launched.

Suddenly, on cue, it was: Hillary Clinton lost because “fake news” about her had been spread around during the campaign.

Fake news sites. That was the reason.

These “fake sites” had to be punished. Somehow. They had to be defamed. Blocked. Censored.

Here is an excerpt from a list of “fake news” sites suggested by one professor. The list is circulating widely on the Web: Project Veritas; Infowars; Breitbart; Coast To Coast AM; Natural News; Zero Hedge; The Daily Sheeple; Activist Post; 21st Century Wire.

Free speech? Bill of Rights? Never heard of it.

Obama put in his two cents: “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television…If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”

Excuse me. “We won’t know what to protect?” Meaning what to favor, what to promote, what to lie about? Meaning only some speech is free?

Obama is way, way behind the curve. Thousands of websites and blogs have been exposing major media as fake for years. I started nomorefakenews.com in 2001.

If Google, Facebook, and Twitter keep expanding their censorship of “disfavored messages,” they’re going to pay a price. More and more users will go elsewhere.

The facade of the major media is getting thinner. You can see a glow of rage and resentment behind it. They’re desperately looking for revenge on the millions and millions of people who are deserting them and laughing at them.

They presumed too much. They presumed they had us in the palm of their hand. We were their property. We were transfixed by their authority.

All that is going away. Bye, bye.

The big shift is accelerating. Independent media are in the ascendance. Understand that. Recognize it.

The impossible is happening.

Fake news sites? Please. The major media are the biggest fakes the world has ever seen. Their anchors and star reporters are bloviating cranks. They’re dinner-theater actors.

Over the years, I’ve talked to some of them. I’ve warned them of their coming troubles. They were miles away from believing me. Now, they’re starting to sweat blood.

Major media news for America is still basically manufactured in New York and Washington—plus occasional outbursts from Hollywood creatures who bemoan the decline of inclusive liberalism, as they expand their gun-toting security staffs and dig deeper bunkers. The New York-Washington axis exists in a self-serving bubble, which has now taken serious punctures. The delusional attacks against “fake sites” underlines how out of touch these elites are with the rest of the country.

Independent media outlets are winning. They won’t be stopped.

When the people who now head the tech giants were growing up, they were heralding the Internet as a new era of free information-exchange. But now that they find themselves working with the government in the Surveillance State, they’re fronting for censorship. In fact, they’re showing they were never for freedom. That was a pose all along. They were, from the beginning, agents of repression. They can try to stop independent media now, but they will fail.

Fake web sites? What about fake companies? What about Google, Facebook, Twitter? Behind their happy-happy messages, they were built to propagandize, profile, and control.

Understand this: major media have a rock-bottom article of faith. It is: “We own the news.”

They can’t give it up. They’ll never give it up. It fuels everything they do. It’s the substance and core of their attitude.

As their ship goes down below the waves, they’ll be chanting it. “We own the news.”

But they don’t. In truth, they never did. For a time, they managed to sell that delusion to the people.

That time is drawing to a close.

The elite political class and their media minions fear more than independent news countering their own news. For obvious reasons, every civilization down through history has had its own monopolistic media, its central “broadcasting system.” Its controlled outlet. But now, The One has become Many.

That is the threat.

The rapid proliferation of The Many is an unpredictable X-factor.

The population is waking up to decentralized media. Instead of the hypnotic attachment to one basic information source—the habit of a lifetime—the public is learning to handle multiple sources. Therefore, the hypnotic spell is being broken and dissolved.

Der Spiegel and the Useless Obso-elites of the Fading Atlanticist Order

It isn’t of course, the end of the world as the cover of Germany’s Time magazine Der Spiegel proclaimed this week, with an image of the dinosaur killing Trump-asteroid burning into the Earth’s atmosphere (once again showing that the dying mainstream media’s editors remain in denial that they’re the dinosaurs and the new media are the furry creatures at their feet who will survive the great extinction event). Just the great culling of what the late Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington, who foresaw the reemergence of nationalism before his death in 2008, dubbed ‘Davos Men’. That is, the Trumpening is indeed signaling the irrelevance and hence uselessness to their bankster hosts of obso-elites like the Swedish political hack Carl Bildt, who are more famous for being famous in pseudo-intellectual and Euro-bureaucratic circles than any actual accomplishments.

Trump’s victory in the teeth of Establishment hatred also signals the great failure of Atlanticists like Bild to inculcate their fear and hatred of ‘Putin’s Russia’ to the American voters of the Midwest, or for that matter the Brexit-eers of the British ‘Rust Belt’ last June. As the French diplomat Talleyrand said of the Bourbons the dynasty overthrown and then briefly restored after the French Revolution depicted in the Trump-anthem inspiring musical Les Miserables, these pathetic globalists learned nothing and forgot everything from their efforts to ‘link’ the Brexit vote to Putin and thereby turn the ex-KGB officer into an omnivorous super villain backfiring on them.

“Speaking after Mr Trump won a shock victory over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, Kremlin advisor Sergei Glazyev said the Democrat politician was a “symbol of war” and under Mr Trump the US had “a chance to change course”.

He told Russian news wire RNS: “Americans had two choices: World War Three or multilateral peace.

“Clinton was a symbol of war, and Trump has a chance to change this course”.

Nonetheless, Putin’s economic adviser Sergey Glazyev — who is well known to the LaRouche movement if not personally to RogueMoney guest Harley Schlanger — observed correctly that Trump’s shock the world win may’ve also saved the planet from nuclear war. Not only did a significant portion of the American and British Deep State (quite possibly including the Royal family with their tacit support for Brexit) choose to step back from the brink of direct military confrontation with nuclear-armed Moscow via the FBI leaks and Wikileaks. But the accelerated unraveling of the State Department and European Union’s ability to bribe or bully politicians into line promises a springtime of the nations — see our upcoming article on the National International and Angela Merkel and her defense minister’s frosty reaction to not only Trump’s victory, but the establishment of the anti-immivasion and Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) platform of Breitbart Germany. Which is already critical of the German Deep State’s plans for a European Union (EU) Army centered on the Franco-German-Dutch rump that will be left of the bloc after the unraveling continues with Italy’s referendum this December:

“Russia believes that the European Army with Germany as its leader will be instrumental in preventing any kind of “fire” coming from the US, Five Eyes and Israel.

Europe doesn’t want a war in Europe. The Empire does, because they are not in Europe. The devastation of Europe in a war would solve ALL their problems.

The European Army as designed by Germany, France and Russia will be instrumental in squeezing NATO out of Europe and liberating Germany from American occupation…

Right now, NATO knows what’s coming and they are increasing their presence in Europe, to make their exit more expensive for Europe and Russia.
The US was given an ultimatum and they are bargaining right now to get more for their withdrawal from Europe.

As soon as NATO is out of Europe, Germany will get all those peace agreements and political freedoms that the US refused to give.

The ‘White Hats’ Who Worked Behind the Scenes to Take Down the Clinton Crime Family

All the same, before the Washington Establishment seeks to undermine a Trump Administration via co-optation where it failed miserably through demonization, it’s worth looking back on why and how the unsinkable SS Hillary sank beneath the waves like the Titanic. The most recent interview between my friend the Florida-based Swiss/White Russian emigre known as The Saker, and Catherine Austin Fitts of the Solari Report is a great place to start for in-depth analysis of how the global(ist) mainstream media shocking event of a Trump presidency came to be. It’s certainly a reminder much like the warnings of W the Intelligence Insider and Deb @BanksterSlayer Caruthers that The Donald could not have come this far without the help of at least some portion of the American ‘Deep State’. And not just the Federal Bureau of Investigation conservative white male ‘cabal’ that Hillary loyalist Sidney Blumenthal and other Clinton confidantes say HRC blames for her loss, together with the two-faced and soon to be ousted FBI director James Comey.

Also joining the shadow war of leaks and counterleaks to unseat the Clintons and their Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) firster allies in Langley like Director John (purported Saudi royal family friend and Sunni Muslim convert while Riyadh station chief) Brennan and ex-Deputy Director Mike Morrell were National Security Agency (NSA) vigilantes. Despite the denials of ex-NSA counterintelligence officer turned disgraced former US Naval War College professor John R. Schindler, these individuals likely saved Hillary’s emails from deletion off her ‘private’ bathroom server, once it became clear to these watchers that the Russians, Chinese, Israelis and quite possibly the French as well as several non-state actor hackers like Guccifer 2.0 had them with all the potential for Kremlin and other foreign state blackmail of HRC they entailed.

What the Russians Did — and Did Not Do — Related to the U.S. Elections

Anyone who still believes the simplistic story that ‘the Russians’ were solely responsible for Wikileaks information, and especially the physical protection of Julian Assange and his allies from being Arkancide-d, or that the John Podesta emails with their suspected euphemisms for pedophilia came entirely from the kompromat seeking efforts of the FSB/GRU’s ‘cozy and fancy’ bear hackers knows little about the real 4 dimensional chess game. Former Tom Clancy co-author/ghostwriter Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a frequent guest on the Alex Jones’ Infowars program, let slip the ‘coup and counter-coup’ that was going on behind the scenes in a video viewed hundreds of thousands of times just a few days before the election.

Finally, the Russians did indeed as Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov hinted play some part by emphasizing Wikileaks in their state-funded media. But the larger message sent to the American Deep State to deep six Hillary or run the risk of nuclear war involved a major show of force in Syria, as well as broader conventional and ‘civil defense’ nuclear war simulations sufficient to convince key decision makers in Whitehall and the Pentagon that Moscow was not bluffing.

Armageddon Averted While Most Americans and Europeans Had No Clue

While the U.S. did have the capability to overwhelm Russian air defenses in Syria, the price of such confrontation in terms of shot down aircraft and US Navy ships sunk with all hands in the Med would not have been worth the horrific price to American and allied military prestige. The myths of invisible F-22s/B-2s and American air supremacy painstakingly built up in the generation since the Reagan defense build up that ‘won’ the first Cold War would’ve never recovered from the blows a small but powerful Russian contingent was capable of inflicting, including via Kalibr and air-launched cruise missile counterstrikes from the Black and Caspian Seas.

Furthermore, unlike the clueless idiots in the U.S. Senate and neocon-dominated mainstream media, the generals and colonels at least understood that American/NATO forces in Ukraine were hostage to good behavior towards Russian servicemen in Syria. Meaning had the U.S. gone all out where it had a numerical advantage in Syria, Moscow made it clear the war would not have remained confined to Syria or even the greater Mideast, but would’ve spilled over into Eastern Europe. Meaning NATO’s own disavowed official observers or foreign legionnaire ‘vacationers’ in the Donbass would have been overrun or captured alongside their Ukrainian Army hosts within 100 hours of Putin giving the order. US units as far afield as Moldova or in former Soviet Central Asia supporting operations in Afghanistan would’ve also been vulnerable to winding up marooned via cut off logistics or under cruise missile and aerial bombardment.

For all of these reasons, when we heard the news that Donald J. Trump had won or was about to win Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and had defeated Hillary, the Russia Analyst got down on his knees and gave thanks to God with a tear in his eye that a global conflagration had been averted. Whether you believe the ‘Deep State’ and some portion of the globalists wanted Mr. Trump to win or not, there is still such a thing as Divine Providence in this world. And God Almighty decided to give America a reprieve from judgement by fire and sword — what Americans do with it now is up to us.

This amazing video from the Tyranny Unmasked channel draws on Andre Raevsky aka The Saker’s analysis of how a Trump presidency could be as transformative of the USA as Putin’s presidency and prime minister-ship have been of post-Soviet Russia:

Below is the key excerpt from Catherine Austin Fitts’ interview recorded with the Saker over a week before the election, which presciently predicts the U.S. Deep State is going to cut its losses:

“Saker: Yes, but I would slightly rephrase it. One very interesting [exiled Ukrainian] analyst in Russia, called
[Rotislav] Ishchenko, has offered a theory, which I think I endorse. It’s that there is a huge fight
happening inside the United States right now between two factions. One faction wants to
sacrifice the US for the sake of the empire, and the second faction wants to sacrifice the
empire for the sake of the United States.

C. Austin Fitts: Right.

Saker: The first faction who wants to sacrifice the US for the sake of the empire –the
neocons and everything that surrounds them – and the second faction, according to
[Rotislav] Ishchenko, and I’m not saying that for a fact is true, but he thinks – and I find that theory at
least plausible – is that that is the power base of Trump.

If that’s what is happening, we probably see that struggle already taking place in Syria
because the US has basically two options there: Either withdraw and let go, or double down.

C. Austin Fitts: Right.

Saker: That’s the risk. Do you double down at any cost, or do you realize, “This is not
viable; I need to get a negotiated settlement.” I think that is what is taking place there.

C. Austin Fitts: Are you saying that the neocons are the faction behind Trump?

Saker: No, the opposite. I’m saying that the neocons are the faction that wants to sacrifice
the US for the sake of the empire and wants the empire at all costs, whereas the Trump
people in that hypothesis, would be those who say, “Forget the empire; let’s save the United
States.”

C. Austin Fitts: Right.

Saker: And these are the people who would favor a negotiated solution pretty much
everywhere. They realize that they cannot hold onto the empire, so the smartest thing to do
when you come to that realization is, what you call in Russia, ‘bringing down while stepping
on the brakes’ which is a controlled deconstruction of the empire – be it the Ukraine, Syria, or the economy or China, etc.

Negotiate and find some kind of way to make a compromise. That would be the way to save
the United States. The neocon solutions are crazy, which is double down everywhere, and if
nothing works, use as much force as needed.

Yesterday I blogged about the strange visit of US Secretary of State John “Ketchup” Kerry to the continent of Antarctica while on a global-trotting diplomatic tour, and right in the middle of what may have been the most important election in US history. All this context, I argued yesterday, may point to a hidden “diplomatic purpose” to his visit there, rather than the “climate change” non-explanation hinted at in the official US State Department announcement. After all, Secretary Kerry can state in Washington at foggy bottom and read the Antarctic climate change data. He doesn’t need to fly there, especially in the middle of an otherwise exclusively diplomatic tour.

But there were other very strange stories going on during the election run-up as well. On the day of the election itself, if the following story shared by Mr. S.D. is to be believed, apparently a power station near the northern Arctic city of Murmansk, and a key area of Russian naval deployments (the large Arctic submarine and naval base of Polyarny is nearby), exploded, a man in the Russian consulate was found dead, and helicopters were landing in a Moscow suburb with a heavy police deployment there:

One website, The Daily Coin, notes in its article (“What the Hell Just Happened in Russia: Powerstation Explosion in Naval Base Region – Helicopters landing on Moscow Streets – Dead Man Found at Russian Consulate in New York”), that the occurrence of this during the American election, taking place on the same day, might have been triggered by a virus like Stuxnet, and implies and speculates that with the accusations prior to the election that the Russians might try to “hack” them, that perhaps all this was a little “too coincidental” and might have been a ploy of some sort to initiate a crisis and influence the American elections. If so, it apparently backfired, as to my knowledge, no major coverage was given to the story, and the Russians were not responding with threats and recriminations, though, as the RT article points out, a special commission has been appointed to study the event. That implies, of course, that they might have their suspicions. After all, it’s not every day that Russian power plants explode, particularly in militarily sensitive regions to that country, and particularly on the very day of an historically important American election.

But wait, there’s more. Two days later, according to this article shared by Mr. V.T., the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky, stated that five Russian banks had apparently been the targets of some sort of cyber-attack, as reported by Yahoo; here’s their story:

Now, you’ll have noticed something about those attacks, but in case you didn’t, here’s the relevant passage:

Moscow (AFP) – A massive cyberattack has hit at least five of Russia’s largest banks, Moscow-based internet security giant Kaspersky said Thursday.

The country’s largest lender, state-controlled Sberbank, said it had been hacked into on Tuesday but managed to neutralise the attack automatically without disturbing its operations.

Kaspersky said in a statement that the distribution of denial attacks (DDoS) began Tuesday at 1300 GMT and targeted “the websites of at least five well-known financial institutions in the top 10” in Russia.

The attacks were still continuing on Thursday. Most lasted around one hour but the longest lasted almost 12 hours, Kaspersky said.

DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.

These attacks saw as many as 660,000 requests being sent per second using a network of more than 24,000 hijacked devices located in 30 countries. More than half the devices were in the United States, India, Taiwan and Israel, Kaspersky said. (Emphasis added)

Note that these attacks (1) began at 1300 hours Greenwich meantime, that is to say, at 1PM London-time, which would have made it 8AM, US eastern time, in other words, as polls had just begun to open in the Eastern and Central time zones of the USA, and that (2) these attacks came from addresses in the USA, India, Taiwan (a close ally of the USA, and the seat of, well, let’s just say, certain NGO [non-governmental organizations] like the former World Anti-Communist League, with its close ties to the American intelligence apparatus, and, incidentally, to post-war Nazis), and Israel. (Another note on the Taiwan: recall that during the Watergate crisis, it was discovered that CREEP, The Committee to Re-Elect the President, was still receiving money and contributions, much of it being laundered through Taiwan, long after Mr. Nixon’s landside victory over Senator George McGovern in 1972. The World Anti-Communist League didn’t cease to exist, but simply re-branded itself. For its associations to Nazis, see Martin A. Lee’s The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right Wing Extremists, pp. 189, 226n).

The clear implication of Kaspersky’s statements was that the USA was taking no chances about Russian cyber-operations during the American election, and in the context of the power plant explosion in Murmansk, the possibility that the latter might have been such an attack increases, in my opinion.

But that’s not my high octane speculation. Prior to the election, most of the claims that the Russians might attempt a cyber-operation in the American election was coming from people in and around the Clinton campaign. Also circulating in the American media, mostly among the independent free press rather than from the corporate globalist lamestream media, were reports of “counter-coups” being led against the Clinton campaign by ad hoc elements of the American deep state, in support of Mr. Trump(see the various allegations and statements made by Dr. Steve Pieczenik). Most readers here are aware that I’ve always taken the position that Mr. Trump’s campaign represented precisely some faction within the American deep state that was not on board with the neocon agenda of the past three Administrations, i.e., of Mr. Clinton, Mr. G.W. Bush, and of Mr. Obama. The curious absence of mention of these stories among the corporate globalist media, especially on election day, when it would seem to have benefitted Mrs. Clinton, if indeed, the left’s assertions of Russian meddling were true, is noteworthy. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s approval of the sale of uranium to Russia would seem to belie her vicious anti-Russian rhetoric during her campaign. So might one be looking rather at an operation that was designed more…

About Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.